How to Move or Backup and Restore Your Font Collection

[Erwin Denissen]

Over the years you've collected a lot of fonts, and in the past you've made a smart decision to use MainType to organize and maintain your font collection.

Now you want to safe a copy of your collection because you don't want to lose it in case your hard drive crashes, or if someone steals your PC. Or maybe you've just bought a new computer, and you want to copy your font collection.

Either way, it's plain easy to copy your fonts. First find out the root folder of your Groups folder:
Open MainType, select Tools on the main menu, and then click Options. You'll see something like:
C:\Users\<yourname>\Documents\My Font Groups

Now you know the folder that contains all your font groups, you can easily make a copy of your whole font collection.

To restore your font collection, or to copy it to a new PC, just install MainType, and use similar steps as described above to find out the root of the groups folder. Then copy the font collection to this folder, and MainType will instantly recognize and process the group folders and the available fonts.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks for the reminder. My old backup was only 46 Mbytes, while my new one was 78 Mbytes.

If you're storing your backup on a USB drive, use 7-Zip to compress your font collection. My backup would be 163 Mbytes as a Zip archive — more than twice the size!

[Erwin Denissen]

With the release of MainType 4, the backup-restore process has been significantly changed.

You can now backup your complete font library through a new utility (High-Logic FmsConfig) that comes with MainType. See the screenshot below.

backup.png (29.8 KiB) Viewed 2932 times

When you click the Create backup button, you can select a folder where you want to store the backup. Within the selected folder a new folder will be created (e.g. fmsbackup20110913) that will contain two folders with vault and font data files.

I guess it is all pretty straightforward, but do let us know if you have questions, or concerns. We know we need to further improve the user manual, so expect that to become available (online as well) later this month.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I successfully created a backup, but why is it so huge? A 7-Zip archive of My Fonts is 89 Mbtyes, but the MainType backup folder is 516 Mbytes. That would have serious implications for users with large font collections keeping backups on external media.

\My Documents\My Fonts\ contains 4,869 files and is 387 Mbytes on disk. That includes many other files besides TTF and OTF, but the majority is fonts.

\Windows\Fonts\ contains 602 files and is 69.3 Mbytes on disk (that's not included in "My Fonts.7z"

[Erwin Denissen]

The Vault initially allocates 512MB for font resources. This is to ensure it doesn't run out of disk space at unexpected moments. This and other checks help us detect upcoming hard disk issues before they actually occur.

The Vault currently doesn't use compression, as we preferred speed above minimizing storage. We might change this in the future, but for now it is working pretty good.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Compressing the backup with 7-Zip reduced the backup folder to a manageable 102 Mbytes.

I agree that the vault needs to be fast, but I think the backup needs to be small. Speed is not much of an issue for something done only occasionally.

[Erwin Denissen]

I've added your request to our to-do list.

[irenefrie]

Newbie here

Where do you find the 'backup and restore' function in MainType 4.0?

Thank you.
Irene

[León Fridsma]

You can backup your fonts and settings via the FMSConfig utility. This can be found in your start menu in the High-Logic MainType folder. (or if you have windows vista/7 you can type FMS in your search bar in the start menu)

[irenefrie]

Thank you.